


Playing Dirty

by navaan



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Gen Fic, POV Female Character, Rescue, Standalone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-12
Updated: 2010-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-12 15:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/126217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor is arrested again on a xenophobe planet. Rose has to get him out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playing Dirty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the livejournal [girlsavesboyfic ficathon](http://community.livejournal.com/girlsavesboyfic/)

She couldn’t believe this was happening.

With the Doctor trouble was always around. But this time she couldn’t really see _why_ the were in trouble. The Doctor was being arrested. Again.

But they hadn’t actually done anything, yet.

They had entered the palace with other tourists from different worlds. Nothing dangerous around. But when they had stepped into the entrance hall to wait for a tour guide, there had been an alarm set off and the Doctor had been taken into custody right away.

“DNA scan,” the Doctor had whispered under his breath, his face calm but tense.

“What is going on?” Rose had asked, desperately trying to stay with the Doctor, but the guard had pointed a scanning device at her and then dismissed her as unimportant. “Doctor?” she had cried, when it was clear that he was not resisting and the guards had no intention of letting her through. “Will anyone tell me what is going on here?!”

The Doctor was looking at her with stern blue eyes. “It’s okay, Rose. I’ll get out of here. Just stay away.” The guards grabbed him roughly by the arms and dragged him away. She watched numbly, but couldn’t do anything. She hated the feeling of helplessness.

“I’m sorry, Miss. You can’t stay here,” an alien woman with violet skin and wearing a palace guard dress uniform told her softly. “The palace is only open to outworlders at the appointed hours of the official guided tours. The tour is gone. You’ll have to leave.”

“But my friend...” She gestured into the direction the Doctor had been dragged by the guards.

“I’m sorry. But Time Lords are not welcome on Tardan Prime. Not since the days of our great prophet Xercan,” the woman explained as if she was speaking to a small child.

Rose looked at her. “But why?”

“All time powers were banned at the beginning of the first grand time war,” the woman said tersely, obviously of the opinion that her answer explained everything. Rose wanted to point out that all this meant nothing to her. But her arm was roughly grabbed and she was steered towards the exit.

“I want to see him. Say good-bye.” She was fighting the grip. “Where will they bring him?” _Being lost on an alien planet again,_ she thought to herself. What would the Doctor do? Talk his way out of it, of course. Or run for it? She looked over at the passage the Doctor had been dragged into and tried to gauge the distance.

“Don’t be silly,” the alien said, reading her mind. “You can’t just run after them. He will be questioned and then they will take him to the Temple of Justice where he will be imprisoned. No place for you,” the woman huffed. Rose let her shoulders sag in defeat. “But if you dash you can reach the back courtyard before they get him into the temple.”

Temple, back courtyard, dash? Rose was committing that to memory and smiled. “Can you point me in the right direction?”

The woman sighed. “Tourists. You’re all the same!”

***

She schooled her features into a slightly lost expression and stepped towards the guards who were leading the now cuffed, but happily chatting Doctor along the alley to the temple that had been pointed out to her.

Rose knew he had spotted her the minute they had stepped out onto the street. The two guards hadn’t.

“You know all that technology you built around your religion: It’s fantastic. I’d say brilliant even, if you wouldn’t waste it on, you know, _religion_. You could seriously improve the life of your citizens with food fabricators instead of cheating your people with false miracles. You see. Priorities. They’re important.”

The guards didn’t react just steered the Doctor towards the temple.

Rose pulled herself together. There were two armed men to outsmart. There was no way she could take out to armed guards on her own. _Not on her own,_ she thought. _And not while playing by the rules._

She crouched down, casually inspecting her shoe laces, peering at the guards that were still not looking into her direction. But they were getting nearer. She’d had to act soon. With both hands she grabbed the sandy dirt that was beneath her feed.

A dessert planet, the Doctor had explained when sand had gotten into her hair. Nothing to worry about, he’d said.

But she was worried now.

She stuffed her closed fists into her jacket pockets and stepped from the shadow of the building into plain sight.

“I’m sorry,” she called out and the two men were turning into her direction not stopping. She hurried to catch up with them.

The Doctor was squinting at her with a neutral expression. After all he had told her to go. He should have know better really. Because where was she supposed to go without him? She didn’t know how to operate the Tardis and she wasn’t sure if tourists were allowed to stay on this slightly xenophobe planet indefinitely.

“I got lost.” Rose looked at the guard nearest to her. He seemed to be the younger of the two. She considered batting her eyelashes at him, but she had no idea what he would see in her. If she had elegant violet skin and dark hair, what would she think about strange aliens with a yellow mop and pale pink complexions? “I need to get back to my group... The transport is...”

“You’re a tourist?” the older man asked. With a violent tug on the Doctor’s arm, he halted their steps to stare at her. She tried her best to look unthreatening and helpless without taking her hands from her pockets.

“Yeah. Obviously.” She smiled sheepishly. “We were on the way to the palace... I was just looking around and suddenly...” Rose was quite proud of the little quiver in her voice. She hoped the two men found it as convincing as she did.

The Doctor looked at her sideways. His blue eyes weren't giving away anything, but the sole fact that he stayed silent and watched her play this out was so very different from normal, that it was frightening. Did he have a back-up plan? Rose could only hope...

The guard gave her a speculative look. For a terrifying moment she thought, he knew who she was and what she was planning to do, but then he squinted his eyes in a way that she had seen boy's do before. Boy's that were sure, they could score with a helpless girl.

“We're kind of busy,” the younger one said in an exasperated voice, trying to get his colleagues attention, nudging the Doctor a little. Rose noticed that neither of them let go of their prisoner. The Doctor looked at her with a little frown now, worried. She could tell.

She starred at the handcuffs, then at the sleazy guard and made sure her eyes were open wide in fake surprise. “Oh,” she stammered. “Oh god... I thought you were something like police... but... Oh god, I'm sorry.” She made a step back as if she was about to flee, then - for effect - she looked at the Doctors shackled hands in fear, back at his face and then at the guard standing right next to her.

“Is he...?”

The one that had wanted to impress her, huffed. “He is under control. You don't have to be afraid.” Her eyes flicked to his impressive pulse weapon. The younger one didn't seem to be carrying a gun. But what did she know about alien tech or alien police forces?

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. “Am I?” he asked in a mocking tone. The guard hit him with the riffle and Rose just knew she had to act while all the attention was on the Doctor.

She slid her fist from her Jacket pockets and said: “No, you never are.” All three men looked up in surprise and she acted. Before they had even registered what was going on she aimed and unleashed her secret weapon.

Not very impressive, but effective.

The sand hit one of them right in the eyes and he screamed out. The Doctor looked stunned for what seemed like eternity but couldn't have been more than a millisecond. She couldn't ponder it. With a well aimed kick into his private parts she send the younger one to his knees. Her mum had told her all about protecting herself after all...

Men were men – alien or not, it seemed.

Before she could turn to look at what was going on behind her, the Doctor had shoved the other guard away from himself, making him stumble. Rose pounced on the disoriented man and he crashed into the street, thankfully loosing his grip on the rifle. The Doctor kicked it away, holding his handcuffed hands in front of himself to keep his balance.

Rose jumped upwards and grabbed him by the arm. “Come on!” she cried. She didn't have to convince him. The older guard was already recovering, wiping sand from his eyes, propping himself up on hands and knees.

There was no time to be lost.

They were running around the corner, into the labyrinth of small and dark streets, that had scared Rose only minutes before.

**

“So? What was that all about?” she asked, watching the Doctor free his hands with his screwdriver. They hadn't really talked since their hasty escape. “They knew about Time Lords.”

He stares at her, then back at his wrists. It would be easier if he just told her, how to do it, but he struggled on in silence. Rose had learned by now that he was stubborn and proud and refrained from offering her help again.

“Time War, huh? Like the plastic brain thing...?” She trailed off, waiting for him to correct her. He never could resist showing off. She had learned that, too.

“Nestene,” he sighed. Then he looked at her. “You could have been hurt.”

“Yes, you could have been imprisoned or worse. What was _that_ all about?”

“Time Lords and their allies destroyed part of this planet. It was war. The planet was a... casualty.” He didn't look up from the handcuffs. “There were many casualties.” His eyes were an intense blue. Rose felt uncomfortable. This was stirring bad memories for him. “They would have taken all technology and then sentenced me to death,” he explained calmly. “I'm not sure they would have known what it takes to kill a Time Lord, though. War, Rose, War makes everybody lose. This was a peaceful friendly planet and now it's governed by tech-sceptics, deceiving religious cults and xenophobes. No one wins. And it was all our fault.”

A big war. A time war. She tried to grasp the concept, but wasn't sure she would ever know what all this meant. She didn’t know if it was a good idea to pry.

But she could empathize with the Doctor. Intense, crazy, forceful, angry, sad and lonely man that he was. Did anybody know him as well as she did? And what did she really know about him?

All this made her think of their first adventure, the way the two of them had met. They had faced the Nestene. Not really together, but getting there. “I saved you again,” she said smugly. “You would still be in custody without me.” And he had just implied that he had been in danger of execution. It made her shudder just to think of it.

The cuffs fell to the ground with a clatter. “Yes, you saved me,” he answered with conviction. “ _Again._ ” Rose had a feeling he was implying something more than he was saying. She didn’t understand, but thought it was better not to ask him directly.

It didn't matter now. They still had time to get to know each other.

“You played dirty,” he remarked in a happier tone. “Rose Tyler, one-girl rescue commando.”

“Sure I played dirty. What would you have done?”

He grinned in that insane childish way of his: “Talked my way out of it, of course!”

She laughed. “You weren't doing a good job of it.” She found a tension leave her body that she hadn't noticed until now. This was finally familiar ground again. She'd attacked armed guards! All on her own.

“Oh, I was!” the Doctor proclaimed, making her smile again. “So? Where did we park?”

She looked around the alleys. All of which looked the same to her. “I have no idea where we are,” she said smiling. “I just ran.”

He grinned back at her and winked. “Then let's find a way out of this maze! If I get arrested again, you'll just have to get me out again.”

He held out his hand and she took it without hesitation. They could look after each other from now on.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also read and comment at my [livejournal or dw accounts](http://navaan.livejournal.com/16952.html).


End file.
